Dr Guy Meadows, co-founder of The Sleep School, is leading research into how people can catch better quality shut-eye.

And in scenes that would mirror the hit film Inception, he says experts are on the cusp of allowing sleepers to interact with their own dreams and merge into other people's.

An article published in GQ Magazine, who interviewed Dr Meadows, reads: “Meadows mentioned cutting-edge advances currently taking place and how they could help at work too.

“In the US, he said, researchers were looking to develop technology within the next decade that would let us interact with our own dreams (assisting with things like problem solving).

“With other advances, you could ‘merge into someone else’s dream’, like video-conferencing.

BREAKTHROUGH: Scientists are on the cusp of allowing people to interact with their dreams (Image: GETTY/WARNERBROS)

“For now, the solutions were more prosaic.

“Caffeine (none after midday), alcohol (not too much) and any form of screen (the blue light makes our brains think its daytime; try to have at least a half-hour break before bed) were bad. A regular sleep routine: good.”

In 2010 fictional film Inception, which starred Hollywood heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio, depicted the idea of entering the dreams of others.

Dom Cobb, played by DiCaprio, uses this ability to steal ideas but is offered a chance at redemption by instead planting an idea during a dream.

It is not yet clear how the process of interacting with our dreams would be carried out.

FUTURE: People could also merge into other people's dreams (Image: GETTY)

"They will always err on the side of having a little more surveillance just in case, they will never protect our privacy.

"There have been demonstrations two or three years ago where people have been shown videos on YouTube and then they've had helmets on detecting the signals.

"Then they have told the experimented people to think about some of those videos and they have been able to replay, discover what the people were thinking about, which videos sequences were going through their minds basically.

"So already it's been demonstrated in the lab that you can interpret people's thoughts to the point of working out what images people are thinking of.

"That's already history, the proof of principle has already happened.”